From the author’s note:
In November 2012 we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the German resettlement action conducted in the Zamość Region. Up to this day those events remain one of the most tragic memories of the World War II for the inhabitants of the Zamość Region. It is hard to find a place untouched by those events. The universally recognizable symbol of the displacement are the “children of the Zamość Region”, who despite their young age, were subjected to ruthless methods of the German displacement apparatus. Even though the people of that region had experienced the terror of war from its very beginning, the beginning of the displacement operation were particularly traumatic for them.
A few years ago, during an academic seminar in Krzyżowa, one of the German participants interested in those events asked me whether there were any places of remembrance in the Zamość region commemorating the pacification and displacement. I answer that in fact every town from which people were displaced is an individual place of remembrance.
Many Polish historians have researched those events. Shortly after World War II researchers started gathering materials testifying to the displacement, which resulted in many publications. Especially worth noticing are the studies prepared by Zygmunt Klukowski and Czasław Madajczyk, who did the pioneering research on that issue, and the study by Zygmunt Mańkowski. There has not yet been a monograph on the displacement that took place in the Zamość Region. During the last few years publications discussing particular aspects of those events came out. I have prepared the album The SS Sonderlaboratorium. The Zamosc region - the first settlement area in the Generalgouvernment" as an attempt to remind the readers of that issue. I hope it will make a point in the discussion on the issue of Nazi planning and application of the “new ethnic order” in Europe. The aim of the publication is to present the particular nature of the events that took place and to place them in broader context.
The album is an academic publication for the general public, devoted not only to the preparation, the course, and nature of the Aktion Zamosc, but also to the phenomena it triggered off: aid to the displaced population of the Zamość Region, civil and military resistance organized by the Polish Underground State, and the attempts to bring war criminals to justice, undertaken by both international and Polish tribunals after the War. The integral part of the picture is the lot of German settlers brought to the Zamość Region as part of the plan to build there the “bastion of German nationhood”.
The album consists of iconographic materials obtained through a detailed survey of library and museum holdings, and of those made available by private persons. It also contains various documents, and accounts provided by people who experiences or witnessed those events.
Agnieszka Jaczyńska
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Author’s note
II. Introduction
Chapter I Displacement from the Polish territories annexed to the Reich
Chapter II Generalplan Ost
Chapter III Displacement Apparatus
Chapter IV Preparations
Chapter V "Aktion Zamosc"
First displacements
"Ukraineraktion"
"Grossaktion"
Chapter VI Pacifications
Chapter VII In the Zamość camp
Chapter VIII In the Zwierzyniec camp
Chapter. IX Auschwitz Concentration Camp
Chapter X Majdanek Concentration Camp
Chapter XI Rentendörfer
Chapter XII Forced Labour
Chapter XIII Children of the Zamość region
Chapter XIV To the rescue
Chapter XV "Blacks"
Chapter XVI "... I order ... a counter-action ... "
Chapter XVII Reconning
Works Cited
Appendix